An network-based forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where users hold conversations in the form of posted messages. Forums have a specific terminology associated with them. For example, a single conversation is referred to as a “thread,” or topic. A discussion forum is hierarchical, or tree-like, in structure. Additionally, a forum can contain a number of sub-forums, each of which may have several topics. Within a forum's overall topic, each new discussion started is referred to as a thread, and can be replied to by as many people as so wish. Depending on the forum's settings, users can be anonymous or have to register with the forum and then subsequently log in in order to post messages.
Question answering (QA) systems do not ingest forum content in a way that takes advantage of the conversational nature of forums. Traditional approaches ingest the entire forum thread as a single message body, or maintain the parent-child structure of conversational nodes without tying posts to one another. Current ingestion processes cannot detect when a forum thread is straying off-topic or diverging to a useful conclusion. Forum content contains subtle information in a conversational nature.